Impacts of climate variability and change have far-reaching implications on water resources and aquatic ecosystems with possible effects including increased occurrences of floods and droughts, water quality degradation, and ecosystem impairments. The economic and environmental modeling strength at CARD, which includes integration of watershed models such as SWAT, econometric models, GIS based interfaces, and other supporting software and databases, was coupled with an array of climate models to evaluate the possible impacts of climate change on water resources both in terms of water quantity and quality.

Highlights

Economic Value of Outdoor Recreation Activities in Iowa
Daniel Otto, Kristin Tylka, and Susan Erickson
Department of Economics, Iowa State University Extension and Outreach, Center for Agricultural and Rural Development, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Iowa State University
Commissioned by the Nature Conservancy with support from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation
September, 2012

New Invited Paper in Transactions of the ASABE
The American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers (ASABE) has published The Agricultural Policy Environmental EXtender (APEX) Model: An Emerging Tool for Landscape and Watershed Environmental Analyses in Transactions of the ASABE as part of the journal’s ongoing invited paper series established by the ASABE Soil and Water Division. CARD researcher Philip Gassman was lead author of the paper; co-authors at other institutions were Jimmy Williams, Xiuying (Susan) Wang, Ali Saleh, Edward Osei, Larry Hauck, César Izaurralde, and Joan Flowers. The paper provides an overview of the APEX structure and describes several innovative applications of the model that have been reported in the scientific literature.

New Research Initiative on Northern Gulf of Mexico Hypoxia and Land Use in the Watershed
The annual extent of the seasonal oxygen-depleted hypoxic (dead) zone that forms in the Northern Gulf of Mexico is about three times the target goal of the Hypoxia Action Plan. The 2007 scientific reassessment of causes and consequences of these hypoxic conditions suggests that both nitrogen and phosphorous loadings from the Upper Mississippi River Basin and Ohio River Basin stream systems are significant contributors to the size and duration of the zone, accounting for about 70% of the total nitrogen and nearly 60% of the phosphorous loading to the Gulf. Read more.

CARD Gets Grants from U.S. EPA to Evaluate Water Quality TradingArt Spratlin, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Region 7, shakes hands with Gerald Miller, ISU College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, after an announcement of $600,000 in grant funding to CARD-ISU from the EPA to evaluate land conservation practices and the effects on three Iowa watersheds.

The Economic Value of Iowa’s Natural Resources
Daniel Otto, Dan Monchuk, Kanlaya Jintanakul, and Catherine Kling
Department of Economics, ISU Extension, Center for Agricultural and Rural Development, College of Agriculture, and Iowa State University
Commissioned by the Sustainable Funding for Natural Resources Study Committee, Iowa General Assembly
December, 2007